It is astonishing to consider the fact that 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the recording career of Marianne Faithfull. Five decades on from that fateful 1964 party in London where she was spotted, at the age of 16, by The Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham – finding herself only three months later a Top 10 pop star with her evocative reading of Jagger/Richards’ As Tears Go By – she has lived a wholly eventful life and produced a wide and varied catalogue of albums.

“Twenty albums in, Marianne Faithfull can still spin the kind of tale that silences a room, then fills it with something unexpected.”— Ann Powers, NPR